A year ago, Shaun Richman, a part-time college student in New York, was too young to drink a beer with the man whose presidential campaign he manages. And that’s presidential as in White House, not frat house.
Sure, Richman’s candidate, David McReynolds, the presidential nominee of the 1,000-member Socialist Party, is only on the ballot in seven states, but that doesn’t discourage Richman. The 21-year-old says the McReynolds candidacy is about awareness, focused on educating the electorate about third-rail issues the major parties won’t touch.
“We do run to offer a serious, credible alternative (to Republican presidential candidate Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Democratic nominee Vice President Al Gore),” he says. “But we realize we have no honest chance of winning.”
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More than 14 million adults between the ages of 18 and 21 will have the opportunity to vote in a presidential election for the first time this November. Most will not vote, if their behavior can be gauged by youth voter turnout in recent years.
Turnout numbers suggest that when it comes to engaging in the political process, many members of Generation Y respond, “Why bother?”
Theories abound explaining the abundant absenteeism of youths on Election Day — apathy, indifference and laziness are among the popular reasons — with most blaming the voter, not the system.
But student involvement in the presidential campaigns of political outsiders suggests that maybe students do care, so long as they have something beyond the current system to care about. In a recent Newsweek poll, 64 percent of voters between 18 and 20 years old said the United States “should have a third major political party.”
By supporting the presidential candidates of third parties, students at Northwestern and around the country are working to give themselves that alternative to Democrats and Republicans. And third-party candidates sense this desire for options rumbling among the “apathetic” masses, and are using the youthful energy of disillusioned college students to fuel in part their campaigns.
“When I turned 18, I woke up early and I went down to register to vote,” Medill junior Megan Merrill said. “This is my first presidential election, and I’m not excited at all (about Bush and Gore). I think a lot of people are feeling the same way.”
But rather than idly allow a man that she doesn’t believe in get elected, Merrill is throwing her time, energy and money behind Libertarian candidate Harry Browne.
Merrill, a leader of the NU chapter of College Libertarians, said her group has worked in the past few weeks to get students registered to vote, and will soon begin distributing informational pamphlets about Browne.
“What we want to show is, ‘Hey, we’re fed up,'” she said. “In order to change things, you have to demonstrate a desire for change.”
Corey Eastwood, the national youth coordinator for presidential candidate Ralph Nader’s campaign, said the Green Party has organized Nader groups on more than 800 college campuses. Nader has a three-part strategy for generating support on college campuses.
The first tier, the drive to register voters, already has passed. They are in the midst of the second tier, promoting Nader’s platform, and the third tier comes on November 7: the push to get people to the polls.
One recent Gallup poll showed support for Nader at 13 percent among 18- to 29-year-olds, making the final facet of Nader’s strategy the most important, Eastwood said.
“It’s a huge part,” he said. “But it’s difficult, and waits to be seen how successful it will be. That group is the least likely to vote.”
McCormick sophomore Adam Watson, who has been executing Eastwood’s playbook here at NU, knows from experience how difficult it can be to motivate students on behalf of a candidate. Watson has been one of several leaders able to organize a group of about 25 students at NU committed to advancing the tenets of the Green Party platform.
Watson cited several reasons why so many students are willing to rally around Nader and other third-party candidates.
“Ralph Nader speaks to issues that students care about,” he said. “Students realize there’s something wrong with politics in America. Students have time to learn about this stuff, and the interest.”
The Natural Law party is another that’s making a concerted effort to appeal to what its Web site calls “the most receptive and concentrated group of voters in the country.”
John Hagelin, the Natural Law presidential candidate, spoke at NU two weeks ago, telling students that others like them were the backbone of his party, and the best chance to overhaul the “morally bankrupt” two-party system.
“Young people have a fresh outlook,” Hagelin told The Daily after his speech. “They haven’t bought into the political status quo. Students want a lasting, forward-looking, sustainable solution. After all, they’re going to be around the longest.”
Hagelin’s party has started Student Natural Law Party clubs all over the country to organize students to help with everything from gathering signatures to running for office.
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NU political science Prof. Kenneth Janda said third parties traditionally recruit a disproportionate number of younger students, mostly because they are at an ideological-formative stage of their political awareness.
“Third parties play to the lack of commitment of young students to existing parties,” he said. “Partisanship is a trait that tends to be acquired over time. Older people tend to be more partisan than younger. Younger people are more open to new parties.”
Alison Byrne Fields, the creative director and chief strategist for Rock The Vote, a nonpartisan group dedicated to educating voters and politicians on the issues that young people care about, said third parties and students are a perfect mix.
“When you’re talking third party candidates, they don’t actually believe they’re going to get elected,” she said. “Their primary focus is to expand the national dialogue. They don’t have to be as strategic, and they can talk to folks that are disenfranchised, angry and more inclined to be vocal.”
Byrne Fields said people come into politics at different stages of their lives, scoffing at the idea that people “suddenly hit a magic birthday and recognize they need to vote.” But she expressed concern that too many young voters are never tuning in to the political system, and instead look to community service and other activities to affect their world.
“People see those (low turnout) numbers and point the finger at young people and say, ‘How apathetic,'” she said. “In fact students don’t look at the political process as being a tool to use to create change, they’re looking at other things.”
The wedge between students and politics is further driven by the fact that some socially aware students sometimes don’t get involved in politics, and consequently mainstream politicians don’t bother focusing on the issues that might attract student interest.
“It’s kind of a catch-22,” said Benjamin Quinto, the national associate director of Youth in Action. “In reaching out to politicians, students don’t think issues are being heard, and (when they become frustrated and withdraw) politicians don’t appeal to them as a constituency.”
Youth In Action, a nonpartisan group dedicated to being a voice for young people, recently completed a National Youth Platform, a list of issues important to youth that included violence, drug abuse, education and the environment.
Officials compiled the platform based on interviews with 10,000 people, and they then presented the document to Nader and Hagelin at two different National Youth Conventions.
Because third parties tackle issues dear to young people, students should shun Democrats and Republicans, said Dan Johnson Weinberger, the Illinois Campaign Coordinator for Nader.
“All they talk about is prescription drugs for seniors,” he said, adding that the perception that young people aren’t involved with politics is proved partially wrong by the demograp
hics of his own office.
“Everybody here is under 30,” he said. “The campaign staff is remarkably young. Some of the older people look down their noses at the Nader campaign, ‘Oh, look at that under-30 crowd.’ But it’s a source of strength. If you’re attracting the young people, the idealists, you must be on to something.”
John Anderson, the former senator from Illinois who ran against Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan in 1980 as an independent, said young people are the key to fixing a political system too influenced by corporate money.
“I think the reforms we need in this country today, in the way we legislate and not have dominated, are important to bring about,” said Anderson, who is supporting Nader in this election. “The young people of this country can do that.”
Former talk-show host Phil Donohue, who has been stumping for Nader recently, also praised the potential of youth involvement in politics, and pointed to third-parties as the best vehicle for that participation.
“Young people, with their longing for something that is new and different, are important,” Donohue said. “They have a feeling for economic justice; they see the wrongs that are being committed in our society today.”
It’s a long, hard road for insurgent political parties in the United States, where there are structural impediments to success, Janda said.
“Third parties have traditionally been at the margins, at the peripheries,” he said. “They will remain so because the rules which dictate the decisions are made essentially between two parties.”
At best, Janda said, third-party candidates may be able to be a spoiler in closely contested races, but Nader and Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan “saying they’re planning on winning is baloney.”
That spoiler role, while a message to the political establishment that there is a vocal constituency advocating change, can be cause for concern for some third-party supporters. For example, there are many students who prefer Nader but fear that supporting him will get Bush elected, Anderson said.
Anderson said Democrats who wish to thwart support of third-party candidacies invoke doomsday scenarios to scare voters into supporting Gore. For example, prophecies about Bush appointing conservatives to the Supreme Court who would vote against Roe vs. Wade are concocted by Democrats, Anderson said.
He pointed to Bush’s record in Texas, where three of the four state supreme court justices he has appointed consistently have voted for abortion rights. Also, any Supreme Court selection that Bush makes would have to be approved by the U.S. Senate.
Anderson warned against succumbing to the myth that a vote made with your conscience is a wasted vote.
“If you have to choose between two evils, don’t choose,” he said.
At last week’s Nader rally in Chicago, documentary-maker Michael Moore also told the audience, made up mostly of students, to vote with courage and with their consciences.
“A vote for Nader is like throwing a political Molotov into this corrupt political system,” he said. “I don’t want you at 18 or 19 or 20 years old to go into that voting booth for the first time and start now not following your conscience. (If) you start now caving in to your conscience, and not doing what you know is right, you’re going to have a miserable life, because it starts in little tiny increments, doing things you don’t really want to be doing.
“You start chipping away at your conscience, you give in over and over and over again to the point you’re no longer yourself — until you’re no longer the 18 year old who believed in something, who stood for something.”
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If the latest voter registration figures are any indication, the 18- to 21-year-olds are not impressed with the options the major parties are offering as places to stand. Half of all young voters have registered as independents, according to a Newsweek poll, compared with 36 percent of all other voters.
Only one-quarter have signed up as Democrats (who are 31 percent of the total population), and a mere 19 percent are registered Republicans (who make up 25 percent of the total electorate).
For many, the answers to society’s problems do not lie within the framework of an established party’s platform.
The words “no chance of winning,” roll off Shaun Richman’s tongue with the cold calculation of a dejected pragmatist many years his elder.
When he concedes the implausibility of a McReynolds victory, his voice lacks the idealism that is a prerequisite for many his age who latch on to a long-shot third-party candidate.
But working for a man he believes in is better than conceding the office to a lesser candidate, he said.”If you’re passive,” he said, “you’re part of the problem.” nyou
Medill junior Claire Bushey is an nyou staffer.She can be reached at [email protected].
